Research software engineering is the application of software engineering practices, methods and techniques for research software, i.e. software that was made for and is mainly used within research projects. As usual for software engineering, this also includes knowledge of other (and in this case varying) research fields as well as open science that need to be incorporated into a software development process. The term was proposed in a research paper in 2010 in response to an empirical survey on tools used for software development in research projects. It started to be used in United Kingdom in 2012, when it was needed to define the type of software development needed in research. This focuses on reproducibility, reusability, and accuracy of data analysis and applications created for research. == Support == Various type of associations and organisations have been created around this role to support the creation of posts in universities and research institutes. In 2014 a Research Software Engineer Association was created in UK, which attracted 160 members in the first three months and which lead to the creation of the Society of Research Software Engineering in 2019. Other countries like the Netherlands, Germany, and the USA followed creating similar communities and there are similar efforts being pursued in Asia, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the Nordic countries, and Belgium. In January 2021 the International Council of RSE Associations was introduced. UK counts over 40 universities and institutes with groups that provide access to software expertise to different areas of research. Additionally, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council created a Research Software Engineer fellowship to promote this role and help the creation of RSE groups across UK, with calls in 2015, 2017, and 2020. The world first RSE conference took place in UK in September 2016 and it has been repeated annually (except for a gap in 2020) since. In 2019 the first national RSE conferences in Germany and the Netherlands were held, next editions were planned for 2020 and then cancelled. US-RSE held its first national conference in 2023. The Research Software Alliance was formed in 2019 to advance the global research software ecosystem by collaborating with decision makers and key influencers. The SORSE (A Series of Online Research Software Events) community was established in late‑2020 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and ran its first online event in September 2020.
List of ARM Cortex-M development tools
This is a list of development tools for 32-bit ARM Cortex-M-based microcontrollers, which consists of Cortex-M0, Cortex-M0+, Cortex-M1, Cortex-M3, Cortex-M4, Cortex-M7, Cortex-M23, Cortex-M33, Cortex-M35P, Cortex-M52, Cortex-M55, and Cortex-M85 cores. == Development toolchains == IDE, compiler, linker, debugger, flashing (in alphabetical order): Ac6 System Workbench for STM32 (based on Eclipse and the GNU GCC toolchain with direct support for all ST-provided evaluation boards, Eval, Discovery and Nucleo, debug with ST-LINK) ARM Development Studio 5 by ARM Ltd. Atmel Studio by Atmel (based on Visual Studio and GNU GCC Toolchain) Code Composer Studio by Texas Instruments CoIDE by CooCox (note - website dead since 2018) Crossware Development Suite for ARM by Crossware CrossWorks for ARM by Rowley Dave by Infineon. For XMC processors only. Includes project wizard, detailed register decoding and a code library still under development. DRT by SOMNIUM Technologies. Based on GCC toolchain and proprietary linker technology. Available as a plugin for Atmel Studio and an Eclipse-based IDE. EmBitz (formerly Em::Blocks) – free, fast (non-eclipse) IDE for ST-LINK (live data updates), OpenOCD, including GNU Tools for ARM and project wizards for ST, Atmel, EnergyMicro etc. Embeetle IDE - free, fast (non-eclipse) IDE. Works both on Linux and Windows. emIDE by emide – free Visual Studio Style IDE including GNU Tools for ARM GNU ARM Eclipse – A family of Eclipse CDT extensions and tools for GNU ARM development GNU Tools (aka GCC) for ARM Embedded Processors by ARM Ltd – free GCC for bare metal IAR Embedded Workbench for ARM by IAR Systems ICC by ImageCraft Keil MDK-ARM by Keil LPCXpresso by NXP (formerly Red Suite by Code Red Technologies) MikroC by mikroe – mikroC MULTI by Green Hills Software, for all Arm 7, 9, Cortex-M, Cortex-R, Cortex-A Ride and RKit for ARM by Raisonance SEGGER Embedded Studio for ARM by Segger. SEGGER Ozone by Segger. STM32CubeIDE by STMicroelectronics - Combines STCubeMX with TrueSTUDIO into a single Eclipse style package Sourcery CodeBench by Mentor Graphics TASKING VX-Toolset by Altium TrueSTUDIO by Atollic Visual Studio by Microsoft as IDE, with GNU Tools as compiler/linker – e.g. supported by VisualGDB VXM Design's Buildroot toolchain for Cortex. It integrates GNU toolchain, Nuttx, filesystem and debugger/flasher in one build. winIDEA/winIDEAOpen by iSYSTEM YAGARTO – free GCC (no longer supported) Code::Blocks (EPS edition) (debug with ST-LINK no GDB and no OpenOCD required) IDE for Arduino ARM boards Arduino – IDE for Atmel SAM3X (Arduino Due) Energia – Arduino IDE for Texas Instruments Tiva and CC3200 Notes: == Debugging tools == JTAG and/or SWD debug interface host adapters (in alphabetical order): Black Magic Probe by 1BitSquared. CMSIS-DAP by Mbed. Crossconnect by Rowley Associates. DSTREAM by ARM Holdings Green Hills Probe and SuperTrace Probe by Green Hills Software. iTAG by iSYSTEM. I-jet by IAR Systems. Jaguar by Crossware. J-Link by Segger Supports JTAG and SWD. Supports ARM7, ARM9, ARM11, Cortex-A, Cortex-M, Cortex-R, Renesas RX, Microchip PIC32. Eclipse plug-in available. Supports GDB, RDI, Ozone debuggers. J-Trace by Segger. Supports JTAG, SWD, and ETM trace on Cortex-M. JTAGjet by Signum. LPC-LINK by Embedded Artists (for NXP) This is only embedded on NXP LPCXpresso development boards. LPC-LINK 2 by NXP. This device can be reconfigured to support 3 different protocols: J-LINK by Segger, CMSIS-DAP by ARM, Redlink by Code Red. Multilink debug probes, Cyclone in-system programming/debugging interfaces, and a GDB Server plug-in for Eclipse-based ARM IDEs by PEmicro. OpenOCD open source GDB server supports a variety of JTAG probes OpenOCD Eclipse plug-in available in GNU ARM Eclipse Plug-ins. AK-OPENJTAG by Artekit (Open JTAG-compatible). AK-LINK by Artekit. PEEDI by RONETIX Debug Probe by Raspberry Pi. RLink by Raisonance. ST-LINK/V2 by STMicroelectronics The ST-LINK/V2 debugger embedded on STM32 Nucleo and Discovery development boards can be converted to SEGGER J-LINK protocol. TRACE32 Debugger and ETM/ITM Trace by Lauterbach. ULINK by Keil. Debugging tools and/or debugging plug-ins (in alphabetical order): Memfault Error Analysis for post mortem debugging Percepio Tracealyzer, RTOS trace visualizer (with Eclipse plugin). Segger SystemView, RTOS trace visualizer. == Real-time operating systems == Commonly referred to as RTOS: == C/C++ software libraries == The following are free C/C++ libraries: ARM Cortex libraries: Cortex Microcontroller Software Interface Standard (CMSIS) libopencm3 (formerly called libopenstm32) libmaple for STM32F1 chips LPCOpen for NXP LPC chips Alternate C standard libraries: Bionic libc, dietlibc, EGLIBC, glibc, klibc, musl, Newlib, uClibc FAT file system libraries: EFSL, FatFs, Petit FatFs Fixed-point math libraries: libfixmath, fixedptc, FPMLib Encryption libraries: Comparison of TLS implementations wolfSSL == Non-C/C++ computer languages and software libraries ==
Aslı Çelikyılmaz
Aslı Çelikyılmaz is an engineer specializing in natural language processing, and particularly in natural language generation for software agents with advanced reasoning and real-world modeling capabilities. Educated in Turkey and Canada, she works in the US as senior research lead at Fundamentals AI Research, Meta. She also holds an affiliate faculty position in computer science at the University of Washington, and is co-editor-in-chief of the journal Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics. == Education and career == Çelikyılmaz is a 1997 graduate of Istanbul Technical University, where she studied industrial engineering. After a 2002 master's degree in computer and information science from Seneca Polytechnic in Toronto, and a second master's degree in information science from the University of Toronto in 2005, she completed a Ph.D. in information science at the University of Toronto in 2008. She worked as a postdoctoral researcher in California, at the University of California, Berkeley, from 2008 to 2010. In 2010 she joined Microsoft in Sunnyvale, California, where she became a senior scientist and later a senior principal researcher in Redmond, Washington. She added her affiliation with the University of Washington in 2018, and moved to Meta in Seattle in 2021. == Recognition == Çelikyılmaz was named to the 2026 class of IEEE Fellows, "for contributions to conversational systems and language generation".
Markov chain Monte Carlo
In statistics, Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is a class of algorithms used to draw samples from a probability distribution. Given a probability distribution, one can construct a Markov chain whose elements' distribution approximates it, i.e. the Markov chain's equilibrium distribution matches the target distribution. The more steps that are included, the more closely the distribution of the sample matches the actual desired distribution. Markov chain Monte Carlo methods are used to study probability distributions that are too complex or too high dimensional to study with analytic techniques alone. Various algorithms exist for constructing such Markov chains, including the Metropolis–Hastings algorithm. == General explanation == Markov chain Monte Carlo methods create samples from a continuous random variable, with probability density proportional to a known function. These samples can be used to evaluate an integral over that variable, as its expected value or variance. Practically, an ensemble of chains is generally developed, starting from a set of points arbitrarily chosen and sufficiently distant from each other. These chains are stochastic processes of "walkers" which move around randomly according to an algorithm that looks for places with a reasonably high contribution to the integral to move into next, assigning them higher probabilities. Random walk Monte Carlo methods are a kind of random simulation or Monte Carlo method. However, whereas the random samples of the integrand used in a conventional Monte Carlo integration are statistically independent, those used in MCMC are autocorrelated. Correlations of samples introduces the need to use the Markov chain central limit theorem when estimating the error of mean values. These algorithms create Markov chains such that they have an equilibrium distribution which is proportional to the function given. == History == The development of MCMC methods is deeply rooted in the early exploration of Monte Carlo (MC) techniques in the mid-20th century, particularly in physics. These developments were marked by the Metropolis algorithm proposed by Nicholas Metropolis, Arianna W. Rosenbluth, Marshall Rosenbluth, Augusta H. Teller, and Edward Teller in 1953, which was designed to tackle high-dimensional integration problems using early computers. Then in 1970, W. K. Hastings generalized this algorithm and inadvertently introduced the component-wise updating idea, later known as Gibbs sampling. Simultaneously, the theoretical foundations for Gibbs sampling were being developed, such as the Hammersley–Clifford theorem from Julian Besag's 1974 paper. Although the seeds of MCMC were sown earlier, including the formal naming of Gibbs sampling in image processing by Stuart Geman and Donald Geman (1984) and the data augmentation method by Martin A. Tanner and Wing Hung Wong (1987), its "revolution" in mainstream statistics largely followed demonstrations of the universality and ease of implementation of sampling methods (especially Gibbs sampling) for complex statistical (particularly Bayesian) problems, spurred by increasing computational power and software like BUGS. This transformation was accompanied by significant theoretical advancements, such as Luke Tierney's (1994) rigorous treatment of MCMC convergence, and Jun S. Liu, Wong, and Augustine Kong's (1994, 1995) analysis of Gibbs sampler structure. Subsequent developments further expanded the MCMC toolkit, including particle filters (Sequential Monte Carlo) for sequential problems, Perfect sampling aiming for exact simulation (Jim Propp and David B. Wilson, 1996), RJMCMC (Peter J. Green, 1995) for handling variable-dimension models, and deeper investigations into convergence diagnostics and the central limit theorem. Overall, the evolution of MCMC represents a paradigm shift in statistical computation, enabling the analysis of numerous previously intractable complex models and continually expanding the scope and impact of statistics. == Mathematical setting == Suppose (Xn) is a Markov Chain in the general state space X {\displaystyle {\mathcal {X}}} with specific properties. We are interested in the limiting behavior of the partial sums: S n ( h ) = 1 n ∑ i = 1 n h ( X i ) {\displaystyle S_{n}(h)={\dfrac {1}{n}}\sum _{i=1}^{n}h(X_{i})} as n goes to infinity. Particularly, we hope to establish the Law of Large Numbers and the Central Limit Theorem for MCMC. In the following, we state some definitions and theorems necessary for the important convergence results. In short, we need the existence of invariant measure and Harris recurrent to establish the Law of Large Numbers of MCMC (Ergodic Theorem). And we need aperiodicity, irreducibility and extra conditions such as reversibility to ensure the Central Limit Theorem holds in MCMC. === Irreducibility and aperiodicity === Recall that in the discrete setting, a Markov chain is said to be irreducible if it is possible to reach any state from any other state in a finite number of steps with positive probability. However, in the continuous setting, point-to-point transitions have zero probability. In this case, φ-irreducibility generalizes irreducibility by using a reference measure φ on the measurable space ( X , B ( X ) ) {\displaystyle ({\mathcal {X}},{\mathcal {B}}({\mathcal {X}}))} . Definition (φ-irreducibility) Given a measure φ {\displaystyle \varphi } defined on ( X , B ( X ) ) {\displaystyle ({\mathcal {X}},{\mathcal {B}}({\mathcal {X}}))} , the Markov chain ( X n ) {\displaystyle (X_{n})} with transition kernel K ( x , y ) {\displaystyle K(x,y)} is φ-irreducible if, for every A ∈ B ( X ) {\displaystyle A\in {\mathcal {B}}({\mathcal {X}})} with φ ( A ) > 0 {\displaystyle \varphi (A)>0} , there exists n {\displaystyle n} such that K n ( x , A ) > 0 {\displaystyle K^{n}(x,A)>0} for all x ∈ X {\displaystyle x\in {\mathcal {X}}} (Equivalently, P x ( τ A < ∞ ) > 0 {\displaystyle P_{x}(\tau _{A}<\infty )>0} , here τ A = inf { n ≥ 1 ; X n ∈ A } {\displaystyle \tau _{A}=\inf\{n\geq 1;X_{n}\in A\}} is the first n {\displaystyle n} for which the chain enters the set A {\displaystyle A} ). This is a more general definition for irreducibility of a Markov chain in non-discrete state space. In the discrete case, an irreducible Markov chain is said to be aperiodic if it has period 1. Formally, the period of a state ω ∈ X {\displaystyle \omega \in {\mathcal {X}}} is defined as: d ( ω ) := g c d { m ≥ 1 ; K m ( ω , ω ) > 0 } {\displaystyle d(\omega ):=\mathrm {gcd} \{m\geq 1\,;\,K^{m}(\omega ,\omega )>0\}} For the general (non-discrete) case, we define aperiodicity in terms of small sets: Definition (Cycle length and small sets) A φ-irreducible Markov chain ( X n ) {\displaystyle (X_{n})} has a cycle of length d if there exists a small set C {\displaystyle C} , an associated integer M {\displaystyle M} , and a probability distribution ν M {\displaystyle \nu _{M}} such that d is the greatest common divisor of: { m ≥ 1 ; ∃ δ m > 0 such that C is small for ν m ≥ δ m ν M } . {\displaystyle \{m\geq 1\,;\,\exists \,\delta _{m}>0{\text{ such that }}C{\text{ is small for }}\nu _{m}\geq \delta _{m}\nu _{M}\}.} A set C {\displaystyle C} is called small if there exists m ∈ N ∗ {\displaystyle m\in \mathbb {N} ^{}} and a nonzero measure ν m {\displaystyle \nu _{m}} such that: K m ( x , A ) ≥ ν m ( A ) , ∀ x ∈ C , ∀ A ∈ B ( X ) . {\displaystyle K^{m}(x,A)\geq \nu _{m}(A),\quad \forall x\in C,\,\forall A\in {\mathcal {B}}({\mathcal {X}}).} === Harris recurrent === Definition (Harris recurrence) A set A {\displaystyle A} is Harris recurrent if P x ( η A = ∞ ) = 1 {\displaystyle P_{x}(\eta _{A}=\infty )=1} for all x ∈ A {\displaystyle x\in A} , where η A = ∑ n = 1 ∞ I A ( X n ) {\displaystyle \eta _{A}=\sum _{n=1}^{\infty }\mathbb {I} _{A}(X_{n})} is the number of visits of the chain ( X n ) {\displaystyle (X_{n})} to the set A {\displaystyle A} . The chain ( X n ) {\displaystyle (X_{n})} is said to be Harris recurrent if there exists a measure ψ {\displaystyle \psi } such that the chain is ψ {\displaystyle \psi } -irreducible and every measurable set A {\displaystyle A} with ψ ( A ) > 0 {\displaystyle \psi (A)>0} is Harris recurrent. A useful criterion for verifying Harris recurrence is the following: Proposition If for every A ∈ B ( X ) {\displaystyle A\in {\mathcal {B}}({\mathcal {X}})} , we have P x ( τ A < ∞ ) = 1 {\displaystyle P_{x}(\tau _{A}<\infty )=1} for every x ∈ A {\displaystyle x\in A} , then P x ( η A = ∞ ) = 1 {\displaystyle P_{x}(\eta _{A}=\infty )=1} for all x ∈ X {\displaystyle x\in {\mathcal {X}}} , and the chain ( X n ) {\displaystyle (X_{n})} is Harris recurrent. This definition is only needed when the state space X {\displaystyle {\mathcal {X}}} is uncountable. In the countable case, recurrence corresponds to E x [ η x ] = ∞ {\displaystyle \mathbb {E} _{x}[\eta _{x}]=\infty } , which is equivalent to P x ( τ x < ∞ ) = 1 {\displaystyle P_{x}(\tau _{x}<\infty )=1} for all x ∈ X {\displaystyle x\i
Julia Hirschberg
Julia Hirschberg is an American computer scientist noted for her research on computational linguistics and natural language processing. She received her first PhD in history from the University of Michigan and the second from the University of Pennsylvania in computer science doing research in Natural Language Processing. She worked at Bell Labs and AT&T Bell Labs from 1985 to 2002 and from 2002 at Columbia University where she is currently the Percy K. and Vida L. W. Hudson Professor of Computer Science. == Biography == Julia Linn Bell Hirschberg received her first Ph.D. degree in history (16th-century Mexico) from University of Michigan in 1976. She served on the History faculty of Smith College from 1974 to 1982. She subsequently shifted to Computer Science studies, receiving her M.S. in Computer and Information Science from University of Pennsylvania in 1982 and a Ph.D. in Computer and Information Science from University of Pennsylvania in 1985. Upon graduation from University of Pennsylvania in 1985, Hirschberg joined AT&T Bell Labs as a Member of Technical staff in the Linguistics Research Department, where she worked on improving prosody assignment for Text-to-Speech Synthesis (TTS) in the Bell Labs TTS system. She was promoted to Department Head in 1994 when she created a new Human Computer Interface Research Lab. She and her department remained at Bell Labs until 1996 when they moved to AT&T Labs Research as part of a corporate reorganization. In 2002, she joined the Columbia University faculty as a professor in the Department of Computer Science. She served as Chair of the Computer Science Department from 2012 to 2018. She still leads classes at Columbia in speech and natural language research and supervises PhD students and a large number of research project students. == Research == Hirschberg's research has included prosody, discourse structure, conversational implicature, text-to-speech synthesis, speech summarization, spoken dialogue systems, emotional speech, deceptive speech, charismatic speech, entrainment, empathetic speech and code-switching. Hirschberg was among the first to combine Natural Language Processing (NLP) approaches to discourse and dialogue with speech research. She pioneered techniques in text analysis for prosody assignment in Text-to-Speech synthesis at Bell laboratories in the 1980s and 1990s, developing corpus-based statistical models based upon syntactic and discourse information which are in general use today in TTS systems. With Janet Pierrehumbert, she developed a theoretical model of intonational meaning. She was a leader in the development of the ToBI conventions for intonational description, which have been extended to numerous languages and which today are the most widely used standard for intonational annotation. Hirschberg has been a pioneer together with Gregory Ward in much experimental work on intonational sources of language meaning and how these interact with pragmatic phenomena, particularly on the meaning of accent (intonational prominent) items and the meaning of intonational contours. She also has innovated in numerous other areas involving prosody and meaning, including the role of grammatical function and surface position in pitch accent location, the use of prosody in disambiguating cue phrases (discourse markers) with Diane Litman, the role of prosody in disambiguation in English, Italian, and Spanish with Cinzia Avesani and Pilar Prieto, and the automatic identification of speech recognition errors using prosodic information, At AT&T Labs she worked with Fernando Pereira, Steve Whittaker, and others on speech search and developing new interfaces for speech navigation. At Columbia, she and her students have continued and extended research on spoken dialogue systems (automatically detecting speech recognition errors and inappropriate system queries, modeling turn-taking behavior, dialogue entrainment, modeling and generating clarification dialogues); on the automatic classification of trust, charisma, deception and emotion from speech; on speech summarization; prosody translation, hedging behavior in text and speech, text-to-speech synthesis, and speech search in low resource languages. She also holds several patents in TTS and in speech search. Corpora she and collaborators have collected include the Boston Directions Corpus, the Columbia SRI Colorado Deception Corpus, and the Columbia Games Corpus. She has served on numerous technical boards and editorial committees. She has served as a member of the Computing Research Association's (CRA) Board of Directors and as co-chair of CRA-W. She is also noted for her leadership in broadening participation in computing. == Awards == Hirschberg's notable honors and awards include: Elected as a member of the National Academy of Artificial Intelligence Academy of Sciences and recipient of the NAAI Artificial Intelligence Exploration Award, 2025 Elected as a Fellow of Asia-Pacific Artificial Intelligence Association (AAIA), 2024. 2020 ISCA Special Service Medal Honorary Doctorate (eredoctoraat) from Tilburg University, Netherlands, 2018. American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2018. IEEE Fellow, 2017 National Academy of Engineering, 2017 ACM Fellow in 2015 Elected member, American Philosophical Society, 2014. Honorary member, Association for Laboratory Phonology, 2014. Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) (Founding) Fellow, 2011. International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) Medal for Scientific Achievement, 2011. IEEE James L. Flanagan Speech and Audio Processing Award, 2011. Honorary Doctorate (Hedersdoktorer), KTH (Royal Institute of Technology) Stockholm, Sweden, 2007. AAAI Fellow, 1994. == Publications == A social history of Puebla de Los Ángeles, 1531-60, 1976 Empirical studies on the disambiguation of cue phrases, 1991 Prosody and conversation, 1998 Most recent publications and other information, https://www.cs.columbia.edu/speech/.
Instance (computer science)
In computer science, an instance or token (from metalogic and metamathematics) is a specific occurrence of a software element that is based on a type definition. When created, an occurrence is said to have been instantiated, and both the creation process and the result of creation are called instantiation. == Examples == Chat AI instance In chat-based AI systems, an assistant can be invoked across many independent conversation sessions (often called a thread), each with its own message history. A specific execution of the assistant over that session may be represented as a run (an execution on a thread). Class instance In object-oriented programming, an object created from a class type. Each instance of a class shares the class-defined structure and behavior but has its own identity and state. Procedural instance In some contexts (including Simula), each procedure call can be viewed as an instance of that procedure—an activation with its own parameters and local variables. Computer instance In cloud computing and virtualization, an instance commonly refers to a provisioned virtual machine or virtual server with an allocated combination of compute, memory, network, and storage resources. Polygonal model In computer graphics, a model may be instanced so it can be drawn multiple times with different transforms and parameters, improving performance by reusing shared geometry data. Program instance In a POSIX-oriented operating system, a running process is an instance of a program. It can be instantiated via system calls such as fork() and exec(). Each executing process is an instance of a program it has been instantiated from.
Alberto Broggi
Alberto Broggi is General Manager at VisLab srl (spinoff of the University of Parma acquired by Silicon-Valley company Ambarella Inc. in June 2015) and a professor of Computer Engineering at the University of Parma in Italy. == Research in computer vision, hardware, and AV == Broggi's research activities started in 1991–1994. His group together with the Dipartimento di Elettronica, Politecnico di Torino, Italy, built their own hardware architecture (named PAPRICA, for PArallel PRocessor for Image Checking and Analysis, based on 256 single-bit processing elements working in SIMD fashion) and installed it on board of a mobile laboratory (Mob-Lab) to develop and test some initial concepts in the field of intelligent vehicles. In 1996, Broggi's group worked to develop a real vehicle prototype (named ARGO, a Lancia Thema passenger car which was equipped with vision sensors, processing systems, and vehicle actuators) and developed the necessary software and hardware that made it able to drive autonomously on standard roads. Broggi's research group (called VisLab from then on) gathered all their findings in a book, which was then also translated in Chinese. When Broggi was with the University of Pavia, his research was extended and applied to extreme conditions (automatic driving on snow and ice): in 2001, VisLab led the research effort of providing a vehicle (RAS, Robot Antartico di Superficie) with sensing capabilities so that it was able to automatically follow the vehicle in front. In 2010 Broggi's group embarked on driving 4 vehicles autonomously from Italy to China with no human intervention. This challenge is called VIAC, for VisLab Intercontinental Autonomous Challenge . Soon after this, Broggi was awarded a second ERC grant (Proof of concept) to industrialize some of the results obtained and successfully tested on the VIAC vehicles. On July 12, 2013, VisLab tested the BRAiVE vehicle in downtown Parma, negotiating two-way narrow rural roads, pedestrian crossings, traffic lights, artificial bumps, pedestrian areas, and tight roundabouts. The vehicle traveled from Parma University Campus up to Piazza della Pilotta (downtown Parma): a 20 minutes run in a real environment, together with real traffic at 11am on a working day, that required absolutely no human intervention. Part of this test was driven with nobody in the driver seat, for the first time ever on public roads.